So much for Barney’s theme song, “I love you, you love me.”
Sandy Duncan’s seven-decade acting career has earned her countless Emmy, Tony, and Golden Globe nominations, but it’s her three-episode arc on Barney & the Backyard Gang in the late 1980s that people still bring up to her.
Duncan was no stranger to children’s programming, with starring roles in Peter Pan on Broadway, the CBS live-action adaptation of Pinocchio, and voice work for Scooby-Doo and Disney’s The Fox and the Hound. But in 1988, amid an ongoing Hollywood writers strike, The Hogan Family actress accepted the part of “Mom” in a direct-to-video series about a friendly purple dinosaur named Barney.
“When I got there and saw what it was, I went, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?'” Duncan joked during an interview on Nostalgia Tonight With Joe Sibilia. “We filmed it, and it was very much a [children’s] show. It ended because I had to go back to work.”
But Barney was far from extinct. After the success of the video series, a pilot was picked up for PBS — and producers wanted Duncan to reprise her role in the television series.
“”They came out to have a meeting with me,” she recalled to Sibilia, “they all had Texas accents, and they said… ‘we’re going to have plush toys and do all this.'”
Demi Lovato (left) and Selena Gomez (right) got their starts on ‘Barney and Friends’ in 2002.
Credit: Everett
Duncan didn’t accept their offer, a choice she later regretted.
But her brief appearance on the original video series was enough to make her a superstar in the Burt Reynolds household. Among the millions of kids who wore out their Barney VHS tapes was the actor’s son Quinton, whom he adopted with wife Loni Anderson in 1988.
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“We were at a big gathering, one of those events, and somebody behind my back creeped up and whispered in my ear, ‘I wanted to kill you,'” — and it was Reynolds, she told Sibilia. “Because he had a toddler, and he said, ‘All we have on television is you and Barney.'”
Three decades later, the Barney franchise is still very much alive: In 2024, a new animated series, Barney’s World, debuted on HBO Max.
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